The Internet provides a dynamic way to distribute content to a diverse audience of users. A streaming distribution of such content is often referred to as “webcasting” where a particular piece of content (e.g., audio, video, etc) is distributed to many different consuming computing devices. Receiving feedback from an audience in response to “pushed” content is problematic in that companies have historically had a difficult time measuring audience reaction and feedback to the topic(s) being discussed in the webcast, both in real-time and after the fact.
One technique is to track user attendance (audience totals) over time, or in a single snapshot. This may be useful, but may also yield false-positives because of concurrent event schedules, schedule conflicts, or technical issues of participating users that have nothing to do with the host-server. Another technique is to interpret sentiment from text-based questions, identifying items like emoticons, tone of language, or sarcasm. However, these types of techniques, while evolving, are relatively unreliable in providing relevant and accurate sentiment analysis in an automated fashion. Accordingly, manual techniques are used to process the provided input. Such a manual process may have different problems (e.g., speed and/or human errors).
Another possible technique is to use polls and surveys of the audience. Such prompting can yield useful data. However, the results may depend on the question being asked (e.g., the same general question being asked in different ways) and/or a spectrum of presented answers. Even with such information, the results may only represent a snapshot of audience response to that question at a particular time. Further, to perform repeated surveys asking similar questions throughout an event can be cumbersome for moderators and annoying to participants.
In view of these and other problems, there exists a need for technical improvements in this field so that audiences can engage (e.g., provide sentiment feedback) with event organizers in new and interesting ways.